Nicodemus pursed his lips. Was this a mistake? “How will you or Language Prime remove my happiness?”
“By making you completely into the man you are becoming.”
His head bobbed back. “Who could be harmed by becoming more thoroughly himself?”
“Who wouldn’t be?”
Nicodemus snorted blackness through his nose. “Is that supposed to be profound or cynical?”
Chimera did not answer.
Nicodemus changed the subject. “How will you teach me Language Prime? Will it be like when the Index thrust its purple language down my throat?”
Chimera chuckled. “No, Fellwroth spoke truthfully about your family. The Solar Empire bred an understanding of the Creator’s language into Imperials. Your ancestry has provided you with an uncanny and unconscious knowledge of how to read and write Language Prime. James Berr also possessed Imperial ancestors.”
Nicodemus’s throat tightened. “I am related to him?”
Chimera made a sound like a yawn. “Berr would be your distant cousin. He paid the price and it broke him. Perhaps you are stronger. Will you learn the first language?”
Nicodemus took a long breath of liquid black. “I will.”
THE DARKNESS LIT up with four aquamarine characters.
“These are the four runes of Language Prime,” Chimera said behind him.
Nicodemus glanced over his shoulder to try to glimpse Chimera but saw only blackness. So he turned back to the complex cyan characters. All were three-dimensional. Two had hexagonal structures; the other two, pentagonal structures. As the runes rotated slowly, Nicodemus realized that he had instantly memorized their every detail. He could already see how they would fit together into long, spiraling sentences.
“I’ve never learned anything so quickly,” he remarked in amazement.
Chimera spoke. “You are not learning; you are awakening an ancestral knowledge. And now that I have shown you the runes, your education is nearly complete.”
Nicodemus laughed, but when the hidden creature did not reply, he realized that she was serious. “But I have no Language Prime vocabulary, no grammar.” He laughed again. “I don’t even know what kind of spells are written in Language Prime.”
Chimera’s reply came in a whisper. “Look at your hands.”
Nicodemus did as he was told and then jumped. An aquamarine glow now suffused his fingers and palms.
“Fiery blood! I’m casting in Language Prime!” He brought his hands closer to be sure. “But the runes are impossibly small,” he said in amazement. “There must be…I don’t know a number large enough to describe how many runes there must be in my pinky alone.”
He pulled back his sleeves and then peered down the collar of his robes. His entire body was saturated with Language Prime. “It doesn’t makesense,” he said. “The other magical languages we forge in our muscles, but these runes are forming in every bit of my body.”
The darkness around Nicodemus undulated as Chimera’s voice drew closer. “That is because Language Prime runes are not controlled by your body. They are your body.”
“That makes no sense. And what is this place, anyway? Is this my real, physical body? Are you showing me illusion?”
“Only your mind is within my book. But the magical body I have given you here will behave just as your physical body does. When you leave the book, you will see that I am not deceiving you.” Suddenly her voice was whispering an inch from his left ear. “Now look into nature.”
Nicodemus turned to see a square window cut into the darkness. On the other side was an image of the nearby nighttime forest. Much was familiar: pine trees, sword ferns, a young buck picking his way among the vegetation and rocks.
But most wondrously, the deer glowed faintly with cyan light. “He’s casting Language Prime!” Nicodemus said. “But that’s impossible. Only humans can…unless he’s a familiar and…” His voice died as he realized that the ferns too glowed with Language Prime spells. Only the rocks were devoid of text.
“This must be fantasy!” he whispered.
“No, Nicodemus Weal, what you saw before you learned Language Prime was illusion. Now see the world with new eyes.”
Just then a pale emperor moth fluttered before the window. A dark tentacle shot out to encircle the moth and drew it into the blackness.
Nicodemus jerked back in surprise. The liquid darkness around him became as thin as air. The window into the forest winked out of existence.
The large moth fluttered about in a panic. Because of the dark, Nicodemus could not see the insect’s body; rather, he saw the Language Prime texts that saturated the creature.
“I have pulled this moth’s mind into the Bestiary and given it a magical body